Folkwrongica

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I got absorbed enough in this Guardian piece to miss my tube stop:

http://music.guardian.co.uk/folk/story/0,,2071468,00.html

A lot of its anecdotal material is good and I can't much disagree with the central argument (tho as they admit Tosches summarises it more neatly) but I didn't like the conclusion - even as a staunch poptimist "the inherent democracy of pop junk" is a MASSIVE handwave.

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I think a problem is that the writers are using Lomax's fetishisation of racial difference to castigate the nuts-and-bolts of his project. Within the project of "collecting and preserving songs", having the criteria "I don't already know this song" is really quite sensible. It's like collecting football stickers - if you turn up with 100 that someone has already got and 1 that he doesn't, you can't really complain when they politely skip the 100.

Is there evidence of Lomax actually rejecting some *unknown* folk songs for not conforming to his 'what is folk' guidelines? The article doesn't make it clear.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

famously* the lomaxes time-managed so as to record lots of field hollers and prison songs but DIDN'T record charlie patton 500 yards down the road -- i think the grounds were implicit rather than explicit, that poatton, as a professional entertainer (albeit within the poor black milieu, and albeit also a key blues innovator), was less "proper folk"** than the field hollers

*famously since calt and wardlow made a big deal of it in their (very good) book on patton

**so here the lomaxes seem to have sidestepped the (local) market-of-pop to plug into the terrace-football-song level of music culture

(disclaimer: i am fairly rusty on all of this)

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

The Willie McTell story strongly suggests it, though I know 0 about this whole area.